Audio conferencing is used as a mechanism to conduct staff meetings, review documents, make presentations through visual slides, implement distance learning, etc. When an audio conference is held, parties strive to use the conference time as efficiently as possible. To use available conferencing time efficiently, copies of reports, documents, and presentations are distributed ahead of time by fax, e-mail, or courier. While it is a good practice to share information in advance of a scheduled conference call, it is possible to have situations where participants do not have time to review documents, do not get them because of an e-mail server going down, travel, vacation, short notice for a meeting, or the author of the documents does not have sufficient lead time to prepare the documents and share with others prior to the meeting time. Often times the business world experiences such situations and a lot of valuable time is lost in faxing or e-mailing the documents during the course of a meeting.
In most cases, audio conferencing is accomplished by systems that are based on either the traditional Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) or more recently, the Internet. Internet based audio conferencing products are available from a variety of vendors, one of which is NetSpeak, Inc. The product name in this case is WebPhone and this product may support multi-point audio conferencing over the Internet.
A variety of products currently exist for combining audio conferencing capabilities with functions incorporated into desktop computers. These features may include such things as application sharing, shared whiteboard's, chat, and file transfer. A significant limitation to running some of these functions may be that they require proprietary software in order to operate. For example, some of the current software will only run on certain platforms such as Windows 95 or Windows NT. The same software will not be compatible with Network Computers (NC) because NC is not a Window's based machine. Further problems may be encountered by those who wish to establish a telephonic connection over the worldwide web. In one situation in particular, users logged in through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) may not be able to call someone on a company's intranet because a firewall will not permit access.